TIA is the book 'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems.' This is the home base for commentary on various subjects, mostly social problems. Social problems are community problems that are based on people, not infrastructure.
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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

What is love?

Shirley wrote:> Does love between two people just happen by chance, is it a choice, or is it created by actions? I know that there are many different types of love depending on the two (or more) people involved.

What is love? What constitutes love? What is the difference between being in love and being "deeply in like"?

There are human needs. Some are physical, such as the need of most people for sex, or at least a release of sexual tension within ourselves. There is also the need for touch, which is almost never mentioned in any literature.

Shirley, the child you grew for nine months inside of you touched you (and you touched him) every moment of every day. When he was born, he could pick you out of a crowd by smell, even if he was unable to focus his eyes.

The other child that you adopted at eight months had been betrayed, abandoned by the mother who had carried him for nine months (at that time, his whole life, and by age 8 months at least half of his life). I don't mean abandoned in a legal sense, of course.

Remember, a child knows only a small amount. So far as the child knows, there is nothing else in the world other than what his parents tell or show him or what he has experienced. Your newly adopted 8 month old baby knew nothing about you...nothing. You, so far as he knew, were the cause for his world being torn apart. What he had been learning for 17 months completely disappeared, totally obliterated. You were not just a stranger, but perhaps the enemy, the equivalent of the antichrist.

By the same token, you had not had that same touch and smell association with your adopted baby as you did with the one you carried yourself.

I am convinced that the close association of mother and offspring (the closest bond known) is a direct result of continuous touching for nine months. When an unwanted child is born, the baby still wants the only person in his world, but the mother feels a final release (especially if she is able to give it up for adoption).

As for other questions of love, any legal or moral bond that does not address the needs of the people involved, whether physical, intellectual, emotional or social, is bound for destruction.

In the case of physical needs of a sexual nature, these change more often with women than with men. Either way, how can a spouse adjust when total sexual commitment is required by legal and religious law, but one partner is no longer able to commit to sex the way he or she used to?

Perhaps the greatest commitment of one spouse or partner to another is the commitment to touch frequently and in a comfortable manner. When that breaks down, we can call it sexual dysfunction or differences in sexual needs, but the differences may be irreconcilable. When one partner doesn't want to touch the other, the differences really are irreconcilable. The rest is wordplay.

> In the Christian Bible Jesus gives us the command (not suggesstion)to love. He directly tell us to make it a choice...you love, or you hate. The words of Jesus are that direct...if we have not love then we have not God within us, because God is Love.

God's love is neither sexual nor physical. If you argue that God created sexuality in humans, does that mean that he intended it to be used extensively (promiscuously) for the propagation of the species, as we believe is the case for all other species of life?

If we humans are different from all other species of life, then how do we act differently? So long as we do not teach what we have learned and change our actions and behaviour based on new information, we are no different from other animals.

The most clear and commanding parts of the Christian Bible were written over five thousand years ago, which is nearly half the time that humans have had agriculture and lived together in civilised groups (towns). Have we learned nothing in half the time of our existence on Earth as thinking sapiens that should cause us to change how we do things? Our major religions say NO. Our governments say NO. Our militaries say NO.

Not many are prepared to say YES. The ones who do will be castigated. In this world, only a few people are prepared to say that to grow means to change. Without change, there is no growth. Those who forbid change defy the laws of nature and of God.

God dictated change and the evidence is all around us. The Bible even says that God changed, when he agreed that he would not drown the world again after the incident with Noah. Yet Christians claim that God never changes.

Sorry, that does not make sense. It's not even true. The Bible says so.

Bill Allin'Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems'www.billallin.com

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